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<h2> AUTHOR'S NOTE </h2>
<p>When this novel first appeared in book form a notion got about that I had
been bolted away with. Some reviewers maintained that the work starting as
a short story had got beyond the writer's control. One or two discovered
internal evidence of the fact, which seemed to amuse them. They pointed
out the limitations of the narrative form. They argued that no man could
have been expected to talk all that time, and other men to listen so long.
It was not, they said, very credible.</p>
<p>After thinking it over for something like sixteen years, I am not so sure
about that. Men have been known, both in the tropics and in the temperate
zone, to sit up half the night 'swapping yarns'. This, however, is but one
yarn, yet with interruptions affording some measure of relief; and in
regard to the listeners' endurance, the postulate must be accepted that
the story was interesting. It is the necessary preliminary assumption. If
I hadn't believed that it was interesting I could never have begun to
write it. As to the mere physical possibility we all know that some
speeches in Parliament have taken nearer six than three hours in delivery;
whereas all that part of the book which is Marlow's narrative can be read
through aloud, I should say, in less than three hours. Besides—though
I have kept strictly all such insignificant details out of the tale—we
may presume that there must have been refreshments on that night, a glass
of mineral water of some sort to help the narrator on.</p>
<p>But, seriously, the truth of the matter is, that my first thought was of a
short story, concerned only with the pilgrim ship episode; nothing more.
And that was a legitimate conception. After writing a few pages, however,
I became for some reason discontented and I laid them aside for a time. I
didn't take them out of the drawer till the late Mr. William Blackwood
suggested I should give something again to his magazine.</p>
<p>It was only then that I perceived that the pilgrim ship episode was a good
starting-point for a free and wandering tale; that it was an event, too,
which could conceivably colour the whole 'sentiment of existence' in a
simple and sensitive character. But all these preliminary moods and
stirrings of spirit were rather obscure at the time, and they do not
appear clearer to me now after the lapse of so many years.</p>
<p>The few pages I had laid aside were not without their weight in the choice
of subject. But the whole was re-written deliberately. When I sat down to
it I knew it would be a long book, though I didn't foresee that it would
spread itself over thirteen numbers of Maga.</p>
<p>I have been asked at times whether this was not the book of mine I liked
best. I am a great foe to favouritism in public life, in private life, and
even in the delicate relationship of an author to his works. As a matter
of principle I will have no favourites; but I don't go so far as to feel
grieved and annoyed by the preference some people give to my Lord Jim. I
won't even say that I 'fail to understand . . .' No! But once I had
occasion to be puzzled and surprised.</p>
<p>A friend of mine returning from Italy had talked with a lady there who did
not like the book. I regretted that, of course, but what surprised me was
the ground of her dislike. 'You know,' she said, 'it is all so morbid.'</p>
<p>The pronouncement gave me food for an hour's anxious thought. Finally I
arrived at the conclusion that, making due allowances for the subject
itself being rather foreign to women's normal sensibilities, the lady
could not have been an Italian. I wonder whether she was European at all?
In any case, no Latin temperament would have perceived anything morbid in
the acute consciousness of lost honour. Such a consciousness may be wrong,
or it may be right, or it may be condemned as artificial; and, perhaps, my
Jim is not a type of wide commonness. But I can safely assure my readers
that he is not the product of coldly perverted thinking. He's not a figure
of Northern Mists either. One sunny morning, in the commonplace
surroundings of an Eastern roadstead, I saw his form pass by—appealing—significant—under
a cloud—perfectly silent. Which is as it should be. It was for me,
with all the sympathy of which I was capable, to seek fit words for his
meaning. He was 'one of us'.</p>
<p>J.C. 1917. <br/> <br/></p>
<hr />
<p><SPAN name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002"></SPAN> <br/> <br/></p>
<h1> LORD JIM </h1>
<p><SPAN name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001"></SPAN> <br/> <br/></p>
<h2> CHAPTER 1 </h2>
<p>He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he
advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head
forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging
bull. His voice was deep, loud, and his manner displayed a kind of dogged
self-assertion which had nothing aggressive in it. It seemed a necessity,
and it was directed apparently as much at himself as at anybody else. He
was spotlessly neat, apparelled in immaculate white from shoes to hat, and
in the various Eastern ports where he got his living as ship-chandler's
water-clerk he was very popular.</p>
<p>A water-clerk need not pass an examination in anything under the sun, but
he must have Ability in the abstract and demonstrate it practically. His
work consists in racing under sail, steam, or oars against other
water-clerks for any ship about to anchor, greeting her captain cheerily,
forcing upon him a card—the business card of the ship-chandler—and
on his first visit on shore piloting him firmly but without ostentation to
a vast, cavern-like shop which is full of things that are eaten and drunk
on board ship; where you can get everything to make her seaworthy and
beautiful, from a set of chain-hooks for her cable to a book of gold-leaf
for the carvings of her stern; and where her commander is received like a
brother by a ship-chandler he has never seen before. There is a cool
parlour, easy-chairs, bottles, cigars, writing implements, a copy of
harbour regulations, and a warmth of welcome that melts the salt of a
three months' passage out of a seaman's heart. The connection thus begun
is kept up, as long as the ship remains in harbour, by the daily visits of
the water-clerk. To the captain he is faithful like a friend and attentive
like a son, with the patience of Job, the unselfish devotion of a woman,
and the jollity of a boon companion. Later on the bill is sent in. It is a
beautiful and humane occupation. Therefore good water-clerks are scarce.
When a water-clerk who possesses Ability in the abstract has also the
advantage of having been brought up to the sea, he is worth to his
employer a lot of money and some humouring. Jim had always good wages and
as much humouring as would have bought the fidelity of a fiend.
Nevertheless, with black ingratitude he would throw up the job suddenly
and depart. To his employers the reasons he gave were obviously
inadequate. They said 'Confounded fool!' as soon as his back was turned.
This was their criticism on his exquisite sensibility.</p>
<p>To the white men in the waterside business and to the captains of ships he
was just Jim—nothing more. He had, of course, another name, but he
was anxious that it should not be pronounced. His incognito, which had as
many holes as a sieve, was not meant to hide a personality but a fact.
When the fact broke through the incognito he would leave suddenly the
seaport where he happened to be at the time and go to another—generally
farther east. He kept to seaports because he was a seaman in exile from
the sea, and had Ability in the abstract, which is good for no other work
but that of a water-clerk. He retreated in good order towards the rising
sun, and the fact followed him casually but inevitably. Thus in the course
of years he was known successively in Bombay, in Calcutta, in Rangoon, in
Penang, in Batavia—and in each of these halting-places was just Jim
the water-clerk. Afterwards, when his keen perception of the Intolerable
drove him away for good from seaports and white men, even into the virgin
forest, the Malays of the jungle village, where he had elected to conceal
his deplorable faculty, added a word to the monosyllable of his incognito.
They called him Tuan Jim: as one might say—Lord Jim.</p>
<p>Originally he came from a parsonage. Many commanders of fine
merchant-ships come from these abodes of piety and peace. Jim's father
possessed such certain knowledge of the Unknowable as made for the
righteousness of people in cottages without disturbing the ease of mind of
those whom an unerring Providence enables to live in mansions. The little
church on a hill had the mossy greyness of a rock seen through a ragged
screen of leaves. It had stood there for centuries, but the trees around
probably remembered the laying of the first stone. Below, the red front of
the rectory gleamed with a warm tint in the midst of grass-plots,
flower-beds, and fir-trees, with an orchard at the back, a paved
stable-yard to the left, and the sloping glass of greenhouses tacked along
a wall of bricks. The living had belonged to the family for generations;
but Jim was one of five sons, and when after a course of light holiday
literature his vocation for the sea had declared itself, he was sent at
once to a 'training-ship for officers of the mercantile marine.'</p>
<p>He learned there a little trigonometry and how to cross top-gallant yards.
He was generally liked. He had the third place in navigation and pulled
stroke in the first cutter. Having a steady head with an excellent
physique, he was very smart aloft. His station was in the fore-top, and
often from there he looked down, with the contempt of a man destined to
shine in the midst of dangers, at the peaceful multitude of roofs cut in
two by the brown tide of the stream, while scattered on the outskirts of
the surrounding plain the factory chimneys rose perpendicular against a
grimy sky, each slender like a pencil, and belching out smoke like a
volcano. He could see the big ships departing, the broad-beamed ferries
constantly on the move, the little boats floating far below his feet, with
the hazy splendour of the sea in the distance, and the hope of a stirring
life in the world of adventure.</p>
<p>On the lower deck in the babel of two hundred voices he would forget
himself, and beforehand live in his mind the sea-life of light literature.
He saw himself saving people from sinking ships, cutting away masts in a
hurricane, swimming through a surf with a line; or as a lonely castaway,
barefooted and half naked, walking on uncovered reefs in search of
shellfish to stave off starvation. He confronted savages on tropical
shores, quelled mutinies on the high seas, and in a small boat upon the
ocean kept up the hearts of despairing men—always an example of
devotion to duty, and as unflinching as a hero in a book.</p>
<p>'Something's up. Come along.'</p>
<p>He leaped to his feet. The boys were streaming up the ladders. Above could
be heard a great scurrying about and shouting, and when he got through the
hatchway he stood still—as if confounded.</p>
<p>It was the dusk of a winter's day. The gale had freshened since noon,
stopping the traffic on the river, and now blew with the strength of a
hurricane in fitful bursts that boomed like salvoes of great guns firing
over the ocean. The rain slanted in sheets that flicked and subsided, and
between whiles Jim had threatening glimpses of the tumbling tide, the
small craft jumbled and tossing along the shore, the motionless buildings
in the driving mist, the broad ferry-boats pitching ponderously at anchor,
the vast landing-stages heaving up and down and smothered in sprays. The
next gust seemed to blow all this away. The air was full of flying water.
There was a fierce purpose in the gale, a furious earnestness in the
screech of the wind, in the brutal tumult of earth and sky, that seemed
directed at him, and made him hold his breath in awe. He stood still. It
seemed to him he was whirled around.</p>
<p>He was jostled. 'Man the cutter!' Boys rushed past him. A coaster running
in for shelter had crashed through a schooner at anchor, and one of the
ship's instructors had seen the accident. A mob of boys clambered on the
rails, clustered round the davits. 'Collision. Just ahead of us. Mr.
Symons saw it.' A push made him stagger against the mizzen-mast, and he
caught hold of a rope. The old training-ship chained to her moorings
quivered all over, bowing gently head to wind, and with her scanty rigging
humming in a deep bass the breathless song of her youth at sea. 'Lower
away!' He saw the boat, manned, drop swiftly below the rail, and rushed
after her. He heard a splash. 'Let go; clear the falls!' He leaned over.
The river alongside seethed in frothy streaks. The cutter could be seen in
the falling darkness under the spell of tide and wind, that for a moment
held her bound, and tossing abreast of the ship. A yelling voice in her
reached him faintly: 'Keep stroke, you young whelps, if you want to save
anybody! Keep stroke!' And suddenly she lifted high her bow, and, leaping
with raised oars over a wave, broke the spell cast upon her by the wind
and tide.</p>
<p>Jim felt his shoulder gripped firmly. 'Too late, youngster.' The captain
of the ship laid a restraining hand on that boy, who seemed on the point
of leaping overboard, and Jim looked up with the pain of conscious defeat
in his eyes. The captain smiled sympathetically. 'Better luck next time.
This will teach you to be smart.'</p>
<p>A shrill cheer greeted the cutter. She came dancing back half full of
water, and with two exhausted men washing about on her bottom boards. The
tumult and the menace of wind and sea now appeared very contemptible to
Jim, increasing the regret of his awe at their inefficient menace. Now he
knew what to think of it. It seemed to him he cared nothing for the gale.
He could affront greater perils. He would do so—better than anybody.
Not a particle of fear was left. Nevertheless he brooded apart that
evening while the bowman of the cutter—a boy with a face like a
girl's and big grey eyes—was the hero of the lower deck. Eager
questioners crowded round him. He narrated: 'I just saw his head bobbing,
and I dashed my boat-hook in the water. It caught in his breeches and I
nearly went overboard, as I thought I would, only old Symons let go the
tiller and grabbed my legs—the boat nearly swamped. Old Symons is a
fine old chap. I don't mind a bit him being grumpy with us. He swore at me
all the time he held my leg, but that was only his way of telling me to
stick to the boat-hook. Old Symons is awfully excitable—isn't he? No—not
the little fair chap—the other, the big one with a beard. When we
pulled him in he groaned, "Oh, my leg! oh, my leg!" and turned up his
eyes. Fancy such a big chap fainting like a girl. Would any of you fellows
faint for a jab with a boat-hook?—I wouldn't. It went into his leg
so far.' He showed the boat-hook, which he had carried below for the
purpose, and produced a sensation. 'No, silly! It was not his flesh that
held him—his breeches did. Lots of blood, of course.'</p>
<p>Jim thought it a pitiful display of vanity. The gale had ministered to a
heroism as spurious as its own pretence of terror. He felt angry with the
brutal tumult of earth and sky for taking him unawares and checking
unfairly a generous readiness for narrow escapes. Otherwise he was rather
glad he had not gone into the cutter, since a lower achievement had served
the turn. He had enlarged his knowledge more than those who had done the
work. When all men flinched, then—he felt sure—he alone would
know how to deal with the spurious menace of wind and seas. He knew what
to think of it. Seen dispassionately, it seemed contemptible. He could
detect no trace of emotion in himself, and the final effect of a
staggering event was that, unnoticed and apart from the noisy crowd of
boys, he exulted with fresh certitude in his avidity for adventure, and in
a sense of many-sided courage.</p>
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